Because you can upgrade that antiquated G4 up to a 2 GHz G4 or a Dual 1.67 with upgrade ZIFs from Sonnet or other vendors.

Because Tiger needs a Radeon 9600 or better to get the best results from Core Image, and to use QE2d, and the Mini has a 9200. Heck, my "Beige G4" has a better video card than the Mini's 9200, and it's PCI!

The Tiger announcement kicked the bottom out of the G3s and the iMacs. But you couldn't get an AGP G4 for less than $600 except on eBay, even if it was something like a G4/450.

G4 prices should be dropping...REGARDLESS of whether Apple anounced the move to Intel or not.

Yeh, but they weren't dropping all that fast until Apple announced the move. Right after that happened you started seeing G4s on the Low End Mac swap list, and they were pretty rare. You ALSO started seeing G5s on the swap list, and they'd NEVER been there before.

They're still ridiculously high. I just had someone ask me if I thought they should buy a Quicksilver (dual 867MHz, Radeon 7000) for $900... when Apple's selling a 1.6GHz G5 reconditioned for $1200. But before the announcement you were looking at that kind of price for just about ANY dual.

Because Tiger needs a Radeon 9600 or better to get the best results from Core Image, and to use QE2d, and the Mini has a 9200. Heck, my "Beige G4" has a better video card than the Mini's 9200, and it's PCI!

The Tiger announcement kicked the bottom out of the G3s and the iMacs. But you couldn't get an AGP G4 for less than $600 except on eBay, even if it was something like a G4/450.

Because Tiger needs a Radeon 9600 or better to get the best results from Core Image, and to use QE2d, and the Mini has a 9200. Heck, my "Beige G4" has a better video card than the Mini's 9200, and it's PCI!

The Tiger announcement kicked the bottom out of the G3s and the iMacs. But you couldn't get an AGP G4 for less than $600 except on eBay, even if it was something like a G4/450.

I would've been SO cool if the mini had a PCI-Express slot.

Why? So we can add a modem? There isn't space for a 16x or 8x slot, let alone room for the external connections. That would've doubled the Mini's size right there. A miniPCI slot would really be what we'd want. It'd allow for an upgraded video card, which is, I assume, what you'd want to use that PCIe slot for._________________Computer Engineer
Junior, Brown University
15" NC8430 HP Laptop
1.42Ghz PPC Mac Mini, 1Gb RAM, 1st Gen
40GB G4 iPod
2GB Black iPod Nano

I was thinking about the mini PCI Express slot like they have in some laptops for video.

I hadn't heard of PCIe in a laptop, probably because there are none in the wild as per my understanding, but I see your point. I don't see why one would want that in a laptop nowadays considering they don't even have that the PCIe connection figured out for laptops besides using ExpressCard. While having a PCCARD (effectively the same as the ExpressCard) video card would be cool, it'd be hard to get the cooling for them to work.

So right now, viable options for PCIe video cards in laptops is non-existent, and will be for at least a year, if not more. MiniPCI provides plenty of bandwidth, is low-cost, and is here-and-now so we could upgrade our laptops today._________________Computer Engineer
Junior, Brown University
15" NC8430 HP Laptop
1.42Ghz PPC Mac Mini, 1Gb RAM, 1st Gen
40GB G4 iPod
2GB Black iPod Nano